The City trader who denies carrying out Britain’s biggest banking fraud was today accused of blaming innocent fellow traders to save his skin.

Kweku Adoboli, 32, is said to have gambled £1.4 billion at Swiss bank UBS and in his fifth day in the witness box at his Southwark crown court trial, he repeated that senior managers had condoned his actions.

In stinging exchanges, prosecutor Sasha Wass QC told him: “You are trying to cast blame on perfectly innocent people — it is another example of you blaming people to save yourself.”

Adoboli replied: “That is incorrect. There were other desks trading in exactly the same way. The reason why they were trading in that way was because that is what the leadership wanted us to do to achieve the profits they had set us.”

Earlier, Adoboli told the jury that he had lied about deals because “I thought it was the right thing to do to buy time to recoup these losses”.

Miss Wass said: “That is exactly what a gambler says — just a few more rounds and I can win back the money I have gambled away.”

But Adoboli snapped: “I am not a gambler, I have never been a gambler and I have never wanted to be a gambler.

"I tried to do my job for UBS and I used methods that everybody accepted were going to extend our risk taking.

"People knew, senior traders knew. The evidence I have given has been backed by real, hard evidence.”

Miss Wass: “You are saying, they knew so it was not dishonest.”

Adoboli: “It is not dishonest if everybody around me engaged in the same behaviour, if senior managers encouraged us to engage in the same behaviour and condoned and encouraged that behaviour.”

Adoboli, of Whitechapel, denies two charges of fraud and four of false accounting. The case continues.